Content Operations -- ContentOps -- is the infrastructure that maximizes your content creators’ efforts and guards against procedural errors by automating as much of the content development process as possible.
This way, your content creators can spend most of their energy on actually creating content, knowing that it’s supported by a dependable foundation. Which begs the question, is your content doing the most good if the processes around developing and sharing it are inconsistent? What if those processes are non-existent altogether?
ContentOps Forms a Foundation for Your Content
As long as we’re creating useful products, it’s up to us, as companies, to make content that clarifies, teaches, and guides users toward using our products successfully. Good content is key to educating customers because it provides the context and skills necessary for them to become proficient users. Once you’ve created a library of content, ContentOps is the foundation upon which it is deployed. That looks different per organization, but the gist is that ContentOps is your organization’s infrastructure and processes that make you capable of creating, managing, organizing, and deploying content repeatedly and efficiently at scale.These systems ensure content teams know where their content is located, how their content development process works, and how to effectively execute that process. With these systems in place, organizations remove much of the time-consuming uncertainty out of the content process. ContentOps ensures that there are commonly known procedures that eliminate the need for content developers to spend too much time focusing on tasks other than creating quality content.
Foundations Differ per Building but Serve the Same Purpose
Every building is different, but wouldn’t stand without a properly laid foundation. The same goes for ContentOps. Different organizations have different content requirements but successfully implemented ContentOps lays the foundation for repeatable, scalable content processes.
Speed
ContentOps allows content creators to make content faster by establishing systems. We use the word systems a lot. It’s defined it as, “a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network.”The content process is an amalgam of moving parts. You don’t simply conjure content from nothing, a lot goes into it making it. ContentOps is the plan that connects those moving parts through efficient systems that can be used over and over again. With ContentOps systems in place, organizations can create content faster because content creators don’t have to worry about the moving parts of the content process and can focus their energy on creating the content itself.
Scale
ContentOps is future-facing. Establishing a solid foundation of ContentOps is essential to scaling your business. Thinking about content production with the future in mind means establishing ContentOps with foresight. The future will demand that our Content Operations scale both functionally to meet new, and unforeseen, requirements and physically as more content is produced and more people are a part of the process.
Functional: Flexibility & Future Capability This means having a ContentOps foundation that’s flexible enough to sustainably support the ever-changing needs of your organization. These systems, well-planned and built early, support current processes while laying the groundwork for supporting what your organization plans to be capable of in the future. This isn’t to say that those ContentOps systems will remain the same because they certainly will not. However, the bones of those systems will be strong enough to confidently build on top of.
Growth: Content & Personnel As your content delivery requirements grow, so will the number of employees required to sustain that output. With this growth comes an inevitable increase in organizational overhead. A strong ContentOps implementation minimizes the costs of a growing content library and the associated personnel. It does this by building systems that help streamline and automate workflows to keep incremental costs down while scaling up output.
Consistency
Good operational systems manifest themselves through consistent processes. When content creators know what systems are in place from start-to-end of the content development process, it provides a consistency that’s notoriously difficult to nail down in the content world. We mentioned all those moving parts being pieces of a system? ContentOps makes every part consistent and commonly known, from brainstorming to publishing. This way, there’s no question about what a content creator needs to do at any point in the content development process. Good ContentOps ensures content creators know what to do, when to do it, and how to execute. These operational standards take the guesswork out of content creation by establishing universally known procedures across your organization.---ContentOps gives your content the footing it needs to achieve its purpose. That said, once you’ve established good systems, it’s important to keep evaluating them. Nothing works forever, so it pays to assess your processes constantly. But, one thing remains certain: when backed by systems that eliminate procedural uncertainty, your content can do more, reach more, and, ultimately, be more.
